Seems fairly transparent: members of the team would like to make it open source closer to the release, but they haven't made a decision yet and will likely do so once the 1.0 release is complete.
I did phrase that terribly. What I meant (and failed) to convey was that the most authoritative source of info on this topic was a post to a relatively obscure LLVM-related mailing list, rather than any sort of official announcement. However, I shouldn't have said "lack of transparency", because the devs could have chosen to not make any sort of public statement at all.
Considering that Swift is built on LLVM, it's not surprising that a comment was made there. It's also probably where an announcement of it being open source would be made (and now probably the Swift blog).
I've heard from various people that any decision on open source wouldn't happen until after 1.0 since the language syntax decisions haven't been nailed down yet.
Interesting thread. Not buying Chris's (with his Apple hat on) answer though.
The idea that you spend a few years to create a new language and have not even had a discussion yet about whether or not it will be open source is simply not credible.
Unless Swift was rushed to release because companies like Apportable were making too much progress and they wanted to herd developers back into the pens with new proprietary languages and APIs e.g. Metal.
Maybe they just don't want to deal with open sourced stuff for 1.0 Reference the arm64 stuff, I bet that the situation is that swift is in heavy flux (which if you follow Chris Lattner on the apple forums you realize they're changing things like crazy right now) and they just don't want to deal with people contributing to something that isn't quite ready. They already committed to saying they will introduce breaking changes in future releases. Maybe the whole team just doesn't have the time to deal with it, who knows, lets wait. Its not like C# suffered by not being open source from the start.
I wouldn't put that past Apple. Remember the more we antagonize them the more likely their legal team might go "not worth the effort just keep it in house".
Have you ever worked at a company that open sources code? I mean it's fairly common, even VERY common that the devs are all for open sourcing the product but the legal department has not made a decision yet. Engineers move at an incredibly swift, no pun intended, pace but Lawyers tend to take glacial ages to decide anything. It's completely and totally credible that the legal department hasn't given their final ok on things, especially at a company like Apple and as large as Apple is.
